What's your favorite everyday tea?

[Rath]

Sugar first, then the milk, then the teabag, then the water, BUT, and here is the caveat; this order is only because of where things are in my kitchen. The mugs and the sugar are in the same cupboard, which is why it goes in first; if I re-did the kitchen, the order would likely change.

[LexW]

I need some sort of Alice in Wonderland-style “off with their head!” gif to adequately respond to that!

[Sarfrin]

Sugar first, then the milk, then the teabag, then the water

You are wrong and you should spend the rest of your life apologising to your ex.

[Skalpadda]

As a Nordic person I have to have at least 3 mugs of coffee a day or they’ll come for me at night.

I started cheating a bit at my old work as we somehow managed to have coffee breaks at least 3x/day, plus coffee after lunch and someone would bring a giant thermos and some mugs to every 5-minute meeting. After a while it started to break me. so I’d switch to Earl Grey instead in the afternoon and it was… acceptable and more importantly didn’t make me feel awful towards the end of the day.

I generally don’t like tea all that much and it does nothing to make me feel less suicidal in the mornings, but I’ve come to the treasonous conclusion that it is superior in the specific circumstance of freshly baked bread. So I’ve started keeping this around.

I first bought it because it’s pink, has a creepy cupid on the front and the name is a stupid pun. I don’t think I’ve read the description or ingredients before. “Black tea from Asia with cornflower and orange blossoms. The heavenly taste is perfected with sweet peach, cream and quince”. Well that sounds disgusting. I wish I hadn’t read it.

[Zephro]

Tea make me nauseous on an empty stomach, and doesn’t have enough caffeine in it to deal with mornings being shit. So mornings I drink coffee, any coffee, doesn’t matter its just a bitter caffeine solution. Then afternoons nice, lovely tea.

[Hanimalle]

In the afternoon, after coming back from work, I usually drink green tea, often from Japan rather than other Asian countries as I enjoy the taste more. Gyokuro for example is among the very best one can taste :

I also enjoy white tea once in a while to mix things up, this one in particular has proven to be quite unique in both taste and texture :

[DeekyFun]

I’m a very unfussy tea drinker. I sometimes find the pressure of making others tea a bit much; how much milk, the brew time, whether to stir the spoon clockwise or anti clockwise. Reading out the Tea-Prayer without making a mistake and accidentally summoning a demon. Its tough business.

So yes, I’ll take tea how its given for the most part. I will admit, given that I just use a mug and kettle, that I’ve always been a little envious of the people who live in area where the water doesn’t seem to turn tea to a mottled shade of dull brown/grey. That rich golden colour is what I crave, but probably don’t deserve.

Oh, also, on a few trips to China I discovered chrysanthemum tea, which I now love but had some trouble sourcing in the UK at the time. Its great.

[LexW]

Reading out the Tea-Prayer without making a mistake and accidentally summoning a demon. Its tough business.

If your parents didn’t teach you to recite the Tea-Prayer right, you should blame them, but your local Tea Council (or Tea Presbyter if in Scotland) should will be holding night classes where they can get you back on track!

I’ve always been a little envious of the people who live in area where the water doesn’t seem to turn tea to a mottled shade of dull brown/grey.

I hate to shill for these fuckers, but the relatively cheap (£24 or something) kettle with a Britta water filter I got does fix this issue. It introduces a two new problems, first that you have to wait briefly before flicking the kettle on (for the water to start going through the filter, and second, for the same reason, you can’t just fill the entire kettle quickly if making tea for multiple people, but if you’re just making tea for yourself, even if you use a giant mug like me, it works. I suppose eventually I will have to change the filter and they’re overpriced, but it’s been a few months, and I’ve found cheapo off-brand filters which should do the job. I suppose you could also get a normal kettle and just a water filter jug to fill it, but the temptation to override it would always be there, and then you’d have limescale just like normal (whereas this seems to have avoided any so far).

As a Nordic person I have to have at least 3 mugs of coffee a day or they’ll come for me at night.

Okay I know this is a tea thread and I’m going to get in trouble, but what kind of coffee do you drink there? Like I guess I’m more interested in brewing methods than specific sources (unless they’re really wild). Like, in the US you have both espresso-based stuff but also drip-filter coffee, and they’re horrified by the notion of instant coffee (as perhaps one should be). In the UK, an awful lot of people (though less so younger or posher middle-class ones) use instant coffee, but there’s also a lot of espresso-machine-based stuff and people using ummmmm those press-down things whose name escapes me.

Personally I’m a renegade and use a drip-filter machine in the UK and people are astonished and talk about US cop shows (they can’t be that, rare, they sell them in the shops! Whatever I guess!), but for some reason I only like to drink a lot of coffee in the summer (!???! mystified by my own behaviour here), whereas in the winter I drink a lot more tea.

[BillButNotBen]

In the afternoon, after coming back from work, I usually drink green tea, often from Japan

I tried switching from Coffee to Green Tea a few years back, as a way to get the caffeine hit without some of the downsides.
Problem was it made me really stinky, so I had to switch back.

Oh, also, on a few trips to China I discovered chrysanthemum tea, which I now love but had some trouble sourcing in the UK at the time. Its great.

As I mentioned upthread, I can’t stand regular western tea, but there are a couple of asian ones that I can drink. Chrysanthemum tea is one of those.

Side anecdote. When I was travelling around China I was intrigued to notice that a lot of bus drivers had a giant glass jar filled with water and cut flowers under their seat. Then when the bus stopped one of them grabbed the jar, unscrewed the top and started drinking it. I assume it was basically DIY tea.

Okay I know this is a tea thread and I’m going to get in trouble, but what kind of coffee do you drink there?

I remember reading a scandi detective novel and while the story wasn’t that exciting, the glimpses of local life and culture were interesting. I have no idea how true it all was, but I assume since it was written by a local…
The most interesting thing for me was that every single house the detective entered seemed to have a pot of coffee on the stove. I got the impression it was just always there and warm and ready to be served.

those press-down things whose name escapes me.

French Presses?

Instant coffee is fine as a quick alternative, but it’s not coffee. Personally, I’ll often have it as a lighter option if I feel like I’ve had too much proper coffee already. (Like today. Proper coffee for breakfast. Instant coffee at 11. Proper coffee after lunch).

I like French Press coffee, and I also like those Italian Bialetti stove top espresso pots… but they are all bastards to clean.
I had a drip coffee machine at one point, but it was also a git to clean.
Paper filter drips are easy to clean, and give a bit of a milder taste.

But personally I use an Aeropress, which is frickin awesome. It looks like a dodgy sex toy, but it’s a mix of a french press, an espresso pot and filter coffee, but without needing to be cleaned. It does burn through a lot of coffee though.

Side note: after a health check telling me I have worryingly high cholesterol levels, I discovered that coffee is a real p.i.t.a for that. Even instant.
French presses seem to be the worst.
Anything with a paper filter is much better as it removes a lot of the problematic oils. Aeropress is also good for that.

[DeekyFun]

Side anecdote. When I was travelling around China I was intrigued to notice that a lot of bus drivers had a giant glass jar filled with water and cut flowers under their seat. Then when the bus stopped one of them grabbed the jar, unscrewed the top and started drinking it. I assume it was basically DIY tea.

When I first had it, it was at a restaurant on my first evening in Beijing, with people I barely knew from our regional office. I didn’t think to even lift the lid of the teapot to take a look. It was only later, when attempting to brew this concoction myself here, that I realized it was simply a ton of flowers in water. I think I had an entire tea-piphany at that point, to be honest (You mean they don’t grow them in little round bags? Can anything be a tea? You know, I think anything can be a tea!) I also learned the hard way when making it myself that you aren’t supposed to drink the first pot you brew.

[Sarfrin]

But personally I use an Aeropress, which is frickin awesome.

I do like mine but we use a Bialetti (I think they’re percolators) when we’re making for both of us.

Side note: after a health check telling me I have worryingly high cholesterol levels, I discovered that coffee is a real p.i.t.a for that. Even instant.

French presses seem to be the worst.

Anything with a paper filter is much better as it removes a lot of the problematic oils. Aeropress is also good for that

Well this is bad news. I’ve just come out of hospital after a minor heart attack. That said, they were happy to provide coffee at regular intervals and it’s not mentioned in the booklet they gave me when I came out, so it can’t be a huge deal.

[Zephro]

We have a drip machine at home that I bought aged 15 as my parents always had one, but I really hate mornings that much. Though most of my life its been instant.
Coffee isn’t worth all the faff of those stupid hand pump things and complex machines for making a single cup in the office. This somehow bans me from being a millenial I think.

[Skalpadda]

Drip brewers are by far the most common, virtually everyone has one. Here’s mine:

French presses and percolators exist but are much less common. It’s not unheard of to have an espresso machine at home but it’s definitely not something you’d expect.

There’s also “kokkaffe”, which I don’t really know how to translate. Literally it means “boil coffee”, you use very coarsely ground beans and either pour boiling water over it and let it sit for a few minutes or bring it to a very light simmer for a while (if you let it boil it’ll turn acidic and disgusting). You don’t filter it but instead add a little cold water and let the grounds sink and pour it carefully. These days it’s almost only done when you’re outdoors at a campfire or something because you don’t need anything but the coffee and a pot/kettle.

Instant coffee is something you keep around for emergencies. I’ve brought it when I’ve gone hiking for a couple of days for example. I also had a coworker who used to add two spoons of instant coffee to his brewed coffee. He’s from Finland though, they’re special. Giving someone instant coffee when they come over will make you friendless fast and I’ve never seen it in a café.

I’ve had coffee in England once, in Newcastle, and it was incredibly weak. This was nearly 20 years ago and I guess I shouldn’t judge a whole country based on one mug of coffee, but I’ve heard lots of complaints about coffee in Britain so it seems to be a thing.

[Hanimalle]

I tried switching from Coffee to Green Tea a few years back, as a way to get the caffeine hit without some of the downsides.
Problem was it made me really stinky, so I had to switch back.

That is problematic indeed and also somewhat surprising since green tea normally helps with reducing toxins in your body and the polyphenols contained in it help, among other things, to improve the smell of your breath.

[LexW]

That machine looks fairly magnificent, is that really burnished steel, or just nice-looking plastic? I’ve never seen anything quite like that.

Re: coffee in the UK, well, 20 years is a long time. The first Starbucks (I know, not good coffee, but it’s a symptom that people want coffee, particularly espresso-based stuff) opened here in 1998, so only 22 years ago (Costa were expanding but still had a pretty small number of shops, and also aren’t amazing). Before that, really only certain cafes and restaurants, usually in the posher bits of London, and particularly but not exclusively those nominally run by Italians or French people, could be trusted to provide anything which was honestly decent coffee. “Normal” cafes either had grim stuff that was drip-filtered and then kept all day (often in a jug where it slowly cooled), or worse, used instant . When I was a teenager I drunk a ton of coffee once I was old enough that I could leave the school to get it (so 16 and older, 1994 onwards), but it was all from non-chain cafes run by Italian or French people (or Swiss but you get the picture). It was definitely cool to do so back then and someone would always be “making a coffee run”. Pretty sure American TV influenced on this, but hey, I enjoyed it.

Now it’s a drastically different situation. Most people my age and younger seem to drink some amount of coffee, and it’s relatively easy to find good coffee in London. Outside of London? I do wonder. Certainly if people try to “sample the local fare” (as tourists etc. are wont to do) and go to a greasy spoon-type cafe, it’s like 50/50 whether it’ll be run by turbo-hipsters who will make an amazing flat white or whatever for you, so good you don’t even want sugar (and I always want sugar!), or you’ll get some sort of mediocre-to-bad “there was an attempt”-type (as per the meme) coffee. Even some coffee shops are pretty awful - like there are two in Balham literally 15 yards from each other, and one of them is turbo-hipster amazing coffee central, and the other, whilst run by lovely people and looking like it would make good coffee, provides coffee that literally tastes like engine oil, and not in a good way.

[Zephro]

Yeah but coffee hipsters are the worst, I’d rather take my chances at the greasy spoon.

[LexW]

I mean, sure they’re the worst if you’re stuck in a pub with them, but I’m buying goods from them, not marrying them or whatever. I’d much rather have good coffee from a man with a ridiculous beard than bad coffee from a “normal bloke” lol. I mean why pay money for coffee worse than you’d make at home? It’s bad enough that 99.9% of tea served everywhere is worse than I’d make at home (or, at best, on-par).

[Skalpadda]

That machine looks fairly magnificent, is that really burnished steel, or just nice-looking plastic? I’ve never seen anything quite like that.

Aluminium. It’s not as fancy as it looks, even though it claims “Design by Porsche” (which I find funny) but it makes good coffee and it makes it relatively fast which are my top two priorities.

“Trendy” coffee places with hipster baristas and a bajillion types of coffee are a thing but I think coffee is so ubiquitous here that we rarely bother getting fancy with it. You can get nice regular coffee anywhere, so who has the best cinnamon rolls is usually the deciding factor.

[Zephro]

Some mixture of the stupid price and the crap slow service? In fairness its mostly just compared to a normalish chain like Costa/Nero, the extra money and hipster are never worth it. Though I pretty much only order cappuccino if I’m out and having coffee as I don’t have a machine for it at home, so it makes coffee seem vaguely worth £2.50

[BillButNotBen]

I’ve had coffee in England once, in Newcastle, and it was incredibly weak. This was nearly 20 years ago and I guess I shouldn’t judge a whole country based on one mug of coffee, but I’ve heard lots of complaints about coffee in Britain so it seems to be a thing.

As LexW says, it has changed a lot in the past 20 years. 20 years ago you there were probably 2 coffee shops in my hometown and they were both greasy working men’s cafes. These days there’s probably 50+ coffee shops and 95% of them are either Starbucks style chains (which is the same everywhere) or trendy cafes.
The coffee in all of those is no weaker than in any other country, and while the quality can vary it’s no better/worse than any other country either.

There’s also “kokkaffe”, which I don’t really know how to translate. Literally it means “boil coffee”,

I guess that’s kinda what was in that detective novel. Though that was on the stove in people’s houses rather than camping.